Topical items and views on the impact of digitisation on publishing and its content and the issues that make the news. This blog follows the report 'Brave New World',
(http://www.ewidgetsonline.com/vcil/bravenewworld.html ), published by the Booksellers Association of the UK and Ireland and authored by Martyn Daniels. The views and comments expressed are those of the author.

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Who Would You Buy; Readers Digest, B&N, Nook, Whatsapp?

This last week has seen three company potentially changing
hands and although they are all very different in the price offered they are also
very different in what they offer their new owners. So which would you buy and
how much are they really worth?

Barnes & Noble

G Asset Management LLC has offered to acquire 51% of Barnes & Noble at $22 a share,
valuing the bookseller at $1.32 billion. They also proposed to acquire 51% of the
Nook e-book division at $5 a share.

The big question is whether the business is worth the
valuation and also exactly what they will do with it in order to get their
return.

Nook is clearly on the ropes, losing executives in a continual
game of musical chairs and only this month declared it will shed engineers on
Nook as they continue to haemorrhage business and try to dump their hardware
development. Competition from Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle continue to
dominate the market and with Kobo picking up the international new business and
aligning with Kobo what does Nook really have to offer? Barnes and Noble made
two fatal ebook errors in not expanding its International reach until it was
too late and not creating an attractive and easy to use self-publishing and
digital content business.

The retail business remains but is like a giant ship that has
built on yesterday’s economic model and is increasingly challenged to tack and
change course in what are choppy and dangerous waters.

The news of G Asset Management offer has increased the
demand and trading in Barnes & Noble shares which closed still short of the
$22 offer price, which would indicate that the market may be sceptical that the
deal will go through. Analysts are expecting Barnes and Noble to announce a
per-share profit of $0.61 on $2.03 billion in revenue, an 8.8% drop from a year
ago. So even splitting the book and Nook businesses may not look that
attractive and maybe Microsoft may wish to counter the Nook offer.

Readers Digest

Next comes a relative little publicised sale of Readers
Digest for just £1 by Better Capital to a venture capitalist. Readers Digest
was once a force to be reckoned with and dominated its marketplace. Better
Capital bought the business out of administration for £14m in 2010 adding a
further £9m of investment, but despite the title’s administration freeing a
£125m black hole in Readers Digest’s pension fund they failed to stave off its
collapse into a company voluntary arrangement last January. Now Mike Luckwell who
made millions from the TV company behind Bob the Builder has snapped up
Reader's Digest UK for £1.

Mr Luckwell wants to take on Saga and focus on the over-50s
market and exploiting financial services opportunities who he states are
increasingly active and under-served by other media groups.

“Over-50s have a very different life than they did 20 years
ago,” Mr Luckwell said. “People over 65 are jumping out of aeroplanes now, it’s
a younger type of audience with a ridiculously high proportion of the wealth
and only 10pc of advertising.”

He plans to restart the Reader’s Digest product sales
business and invest in its online services, even potentially charging for
access to its website and couple this with an expansion into financial services.
So is the brand recoverable and importantly is the mailing list that is key to
its reestablishment sufficiently active to support it? The mail list may be
huge but like all lists it ages quickly and becomes harder to mine effectively
when the vast majority is postal and you wish to convert them to a digital
business. However, managing the list and renting it could be attractive and the
brand alone is a steal for £1.

The purchase raises the question why no publisher who had
any intentions to offer a direct to consumer offer did not stump up the cash to
buy Readers Digest for a £1?

Whatsapp

Facebook announced last Thursday that it would pay $4bn
(£2.4bn) in cash and $15bn (£9bn) in Facebook shares as part of the deal to buy
the Whatsapp real-time messaging
service. The app's founders and employees will get $3bn (£1.8bn) of the shares
as four year restricted stock. Facebook previously bought Instagram for $1bn and
has a strategy of extending its community offer buy acquistion.

Since the likes of Skype first showed that connecting people
for free over the internet could build and deliver huge communities others have
taken up the mantle. So does being able to offer even further growth as well as
extending the offer make Watsapp a perfect Facebook fit?

It is not that the service is ad free, or has stringent
privacy rules, or that it has relatively small in overheads in only having some
50 staff, as all these could change with the wind. What is important is that it
has the community, the quality of the service and is easy and free to use. When
you plug this into Facebook you have a rich community with multiple ways to
effectively communicate and this starts to protect Facebook from others who
merely copy and refine their current offer. The younger Facebook generation who
may be becoming disillusioned with the site that is now being used by their
parents and even grandparents, may be retained by the lure of comprehensive connection
by any means under one roof and advertisers just value more connections and a
larger community.

We may question the price paid but it is relatively chump
change for Facebook to stump up and offers them a quick growth and increased
valuation options. There are few who have the cash or the benefits case to
compete with such a purchase but it is worth noting that Skype has gone
somewhat corporate and dry since it was itself acquired by Microsoft and this
has fuelled the likes of Whatsapp. However Facebook doesn’t yet have the same
corporate treacle of Microsoft so can probably ingest Whatsapp a lot better.

So which is the best
buy and which buyer offers the best investment strategy? All three are very
different but all

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About Me

Before entering publishing I worked for many years as a Senior Executive in blue chip organisations in the retail, oil and automotive sectors. My publishing induction was initially as Director of Strategic Development at VISTA. There I was responsible for, and a contributor to, their highly acclaimed ‘Publishing in the 21st Century’ research series, the primary creator behind publishing services PubEasy and ‘batch.co.uk’, the initiator of the development of new Front Office systems to support publishers. In 2006 I joined Value Chain International(VCIL) initially as VP Marketing, Media and Publishing before becoming their President in 2009. In July 2011 the company's operations were acquired by Syncordia. I hold two non executive positions with publishing industry players Bibliophile Ltd and Haven Group and currently setting up Read Petite a service focused on providing digital short form material online via subscription.
Email mdaniels@opus57.co.uk